The best way to implement crop rotation in Farthest Frontier

Give a man a crop, he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to run an effective crop rotation in Farthest Frontier, he’ll feed a whole village.

Known for being a modern classic city-building simulator, Farthest Frontier requires a lot of planning to maintain an eventual population of 1,000. Players must be careful about how they hunt, gather, and produce their food through agriculture. Many have found that mimicking real-world farming practices is the key to success.

Here’s what players need to know about crop rotation and how to use it to maximize their yields.

The optimal Farthest Frontier crop rotation

To maximize yield, Farthest Frontier players need to use crop rotation to keep their food supply stable.

Crop rotation is a real-world farming method where farmers plant different crops in order over a period of time. This can help with several problems, from nutrient depletion in the soil to diseases that become more common when farmers grow the same crop over and over again.

In a given year, a Farthest Frontier player should have two fields for crops and a third field for maintenance. This should rotate each year, with two fields growing and one field empty. While players can and possibly should have more fields, the general rule of thumb is to have one maintenance field for every two crop-growing fields.

The purpose of the maintenance field

In Farthest Frontier, as well as real life, the maintenance field helps to keep all crops healthy and improve yield. Any plant diseases will die out in the fallow field, and fertility will improve as nutrients have time to replenish. This is also a good time to take care of any field problems that can affect growing, like weeds or rockiness. Players during a field’s maintenance phase should do at least one of the following to make it easier to grow crops there the following year.

• Perform field maintenance to suppress weed growth, reduce rockiness
• Change soil composition for specific crops, if applicable
• Grow clover to increase fertility

Types of crops and benefits

Farthest Frontier includes several different types of crops that all have different frost resistances, soil quality requirements, and fertility effects. Soil requirements in particular is best seen after the particular crop is planted and can be changed by adding clay or sand, since it’s given qualitatively. Here are all of the crops with their influence on fertility and preferred growth season.

Most plants typically drain fertility, which is part of the reason why having a maintenance year or growing clover is suggested for a good crop rotation. However, several poor fertility crops like wheat and root vegetables are necessary for a settlement’s survival. Man cannot live on peas alone, after all.

Certain crops typically shouldn’t be grown if possible in the same year because of diseases. Both turnips and cabbages, for instance, are susceptible to clubroot and leafspots. If infected, this won’t only take out one crop but both and leave a player’s villagers to starve. However, wheat and peas have no such overlaps and make good crops to grow together. This isn’t generally a problem for either leeks or flax

Best crop rotations in Farthest Frontier

Assuming that a player’s fields are well maintained for their environment, the best crop rotations involve maximizing high productivity or high fertility in Farthest Frontier.

For each field, players can plan ahead for the next three years. Ideally, at least one of those years should be maintenance, performing one or more of the tasks listed above. It also doesn’t hurt to grow clover in one of the non-maintenance fields during a season to improve fertility. This is especially true if growing crops like wheat or leeks.

An example of a fertility-boosting crop rotation in Farthest Frontier relies on peas, clover, and field maintenance. It also includes flax, needed to make clothes, but could include another lower fertility-draining crop like buckwheat instead. Others recommend carrots in the same year as peas, but be warned that powdery mildew can affect them both.

Crop rotations can also be fertility-neutral, which will be the case for growing most things. Spending a year growing root vegetables can help with any food storage or spoilage problems, since they last a long time and even longer if the village has a canning industry already. The player here is using the first field somewhat as a maintenance field this cycle, although turnips can still be a drain.

The last example crop rotation here has to be supplemented by composting but is highly productive. It has the first field first containing clover and then wheat, the second field with maintenance and then wheat, and the third field with leeks and then clover. Both leeks and wheat are high fertility drains, but are not affected by the same diseases, meaning that there shouldn’t be significant crop loss. However, in the next year, players will want to return to higher-fertility crop rotations.

Notably, none of the above crop rotation suggestions take field maintenance into account. Following each year, players should check on their disease rates, weediness, and rockiness. If levels are high, their crop fields would benefit from being only maintained or grown with clover in the following years. Creating a steady crop rotation in Farthest Frontier can take time, but players and their settlements will benefit greatly from having a consistent food source.